Fred Wilson – conceptual artist par excellence

Associated media

Fred Wilson: A Critical Reader

Edited by Doro Globus

American installation artist, MacArthur Foundation genius-grant winner and Whitney Museum trustee Fred Wilson was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1954. He received his Bachelor’s degree in studio art from the State University of New York in 1976. Realizing he wasn’t interested in making things with his hands, however, Wilson became involved in museum education. He worked on a freelance basis for the American Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Crafts Museum. With his awareness of the presentation of objects formed by the three paradigms of ethnography, fine art and design, Wilson was superbly positioned to comment on ways in which display influences how an object and the culture or individual to which it is attached is received by viewers.

In the late 1980s Wilson began creating pseudo-museum installations, akin to but differing in focus from work such as that of Hans Haacke and Marcel Broodthaers. His breakthrough came in 1992, when the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, invited him to work with staff of the Maryland Historical Society to develop a re-installation of the latter’s collection.

The idea was to present and represent familiar and unfamiliar objects, so that their mode of display would provide a reflexive critique of conventional installations and reveal how discriminatory they were. The focus was on marginalization of African-Americans and what Wilson calls ‘Amerindians’ – both of whom are included amongst Wilson’s ancestors. Titled ‘Mining the Museum’, the resulting exhibition propelled Wilson to the first rank of conceptual artists, and inspired (and continues to inspire) countless imitators.

Harbouring doubts about a book makes reviewing it a sad, frustrating affair. Particularly when the book in question treats a subject as important as this. Yet Fred Wilson: A Critical Reader, as published by Ridinghouse and edited by Doro Globus, does little justice to the artist and his career. Instead, it includes a number of turgidly written essays that are painfully redundant with respect to Wilson’s projects and to their analysis. Most of them reference ‘Mining the Museum’ to the extent that one is left wondering whether Wilson’s career went into decline after that point. Indeed, two of them, both by Jennifer A. Gonzalez, contain numerous, consecutive, identical paragraphs. Most frustrating of all, there is no editor’s statement, no sense of why these essays were chosen and others were not—for example, the 1993 collaboration between Wilson and Ivan Karp in ‘Constructing the Spectacle of Culture in Museums’.

Fred Wilson: A Critical Readeris not for a general art readership but, were it at once more concisely and more inclusively edited, it would be a worthwhile addition to the library of any researcher interested in museum studies, African–American art, contemporary conceptual art and so on. As it stands, the only reason for its publication seems to be that Ridinghouse, which published it, is affiliated with Karsten Schubert Gallery, which recently mounted an ambitious retrospective addressing Wilson’s critical museological interventions.

Although I doubt he would complain, Wilson deserves better than this.

Fred Wilson: A Critical Reader edited by Doro Globus is published by Ridinghouse, 2011. 507 pp.  122 colour /1 mono illus. ISBN 9-781905-464364